More comprehensive Date/Time handling

[Carl]

To keep from being too specific, the "Idea" is that Alteryx Designer should do better at recognizing and handling Date/Times on input. Thoughts include:
 
1) Offer more choices in the Parse: DateTime tool, including am/pm.
2) Allow users to add new formats to the Parse: DateTime lists.
3) Include user-added formats in the Preparation: Auto Field tool's library.
4) Don't require zero-padding of days and hours in the DateTimeParse() function.  (1/1/2014 1:23:45 AM looks enough like a date that DateTimeParse() should be able to figure it out, but it stumbles on day and hour.)
 
My particular difficulty is that I have incoming date/times with AM/PM components.  I've gone ahead and created a macro to take care of that for now, but it certainly seems like that sort of thing would be handled automatically.
 
Thanks!

[sphwillis]

Also, in the DateTime tool, please add more input format strings especially with dates containing '-Mon-'. for example, this one is not available. dd-Mon-yyyy. You would make oracle users happy. Or give user flexibility to define input format like in Excel.

 

[mark_cyr]

I encountered this limitation today.  Lack of zero-padding (month, day, hour) and AM/PM confuse both the DateTime tool as well as the DateTimeParse tool.  I have the same date format as the original poster (e.g. 1/1/2014 1:23:45 PM), and I cannot parse this date without preparing the data first.

[john_miller9]

Agree with what other posters have stated.  I have an application that outputs Date / Time in the following format that isn't recognized by Alteryx.

10/16/2013 6:11:04 AM 

Right now, i am working with this by blowing up each component (Day, Month, Year, Hour, Minute, Second) using a Text to Columns parse tool and padding as appropriate, and then concatenating back into an Alteryx recognized Date/Time format.

[bkornell]

The ability to use DateTimeTrim to truncate to the beginning of the week would also be very helpful. We do this all the time.

[GilYee]

Astonishing how this very common format isn't built in.

[adrianho]

This tool really need to allow users to write the datetimeformat as a string.

The one thing that astonnishes me is that this tool does not handle Alteryxes own conversions.

If you have a list with sales and dates, and convert it into a crosstab, with the dates as columns. then Alteryx makes the headers have the format "YYYY_MM_DD". This format is NOT on the list of available formats in the DateTimeTool...... I am amazed

[jrdepriest]

So this is coming soon?

I wanted to mention that it should understand timezone formatting, both TZ and -500 type formats. As it is, I just carve that stuff out and ignore it, but if I have multiple time zones in the same file, it becomes difficult and requires extra steps.